According to the statistics of American government, in the past five years, the number of deaths caused by unintended drug overdoses doubled in the United States. They increased from 11 155 in 1999 to 19 838 in 2004, according to the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
According to the reports of The Associated Press, the CDC, using death certificates, discovered that medicines overdoses replaced falls as the second most frequent cause of unintended death between 1999 and 2004. Car accidents remained far ahead insofar as actual numbers were concerned, from 40 965 fatalities in 1999 to 43 432 in 2004.
So far, the scientists have not managed to prove that prescription medications may constitute the reason for this increase. They told the wire service that they believed that the inappropriate use of medicines such as Vicodin and Oxycontin may have been the main contributor.
Moreover, the availability of prescription medications illegally is still a serious problem. In research published last week by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, nearly 82 per cent of the participants admitted that they illegally obtained their prescription medicines from a drug dealer. Just over half of them said that their friends or relatives also constituted a valuable source, even though no information was gathered concerning where those contacts originally got the medicines.
